“You Can't Spend Years with Someone and Just Cast Them Aside”: Augmented Identity in Older British Widows

Abstract

Widowhood forces women to reconstruct their identities. This article discusses how this reconstruction occurs. Interviews were conducted with 65 older widows exploring their experiences: Of those, 81% spoke about identity. This reconstruction can be understood in terms of continuing bonds with the deceased, loosening bonds, and personal growth. Women discussed these transitions in four ways: personal struggle, resistance to social expectations, empowerment, and using rhetoric. The reconstructed identity is not that of wife but rather that of an augmented identity of wife/widow. The tensions between how the widows see themselves, and how society sees them are explored.

KEYWORDS:

• later life
• widowhood
• women
• social construction
• identity

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to the women who participated in this study and to the people who assisted with data collection. Thanks are also due to Georgina Hughes, Philip Smith, Steph Vidal-Hall, Jeanette Davies, and Gillian Bennett. I would like to thank the Department of Human Communication, De Montfort University, for support. This research study was also supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (Award No. L480254034) and was part of the Growing Older Programme of 24 projects studying the quality of life of older people. However, the findings reported here are entirely the responsibility of the researchers.

Notes

1. There were seven women who had been married twice. However, only four of them discussed issues of identity. This is 57%, whereas for those who have had only one husband, it is 84%. This raises an interesting question for which there is insufficient data to answer: Is identity reconstruction different for those who remarry?